July 22, 2013

Time for feedback on last month’s APSOTW assignment, As a quick reminder, this was the brief:

This is an exercise in
the often overlooked art of defining the problem to be solved and therefore the
role for communications. It's a simple challenge we're setting:

Imagine you are at your
desk and your phone rings.

It's the new CMO of Kiehl's, a
wildly successful brand of stripped down cosmetics. Retail stores around
the world. Acquired in 2000 by L'Oreal.

Success has been built
through great word of mouth and their habit of giving free samples for you to
use or pass along to friends and family.

There has been little, if
any, 'traditional' paid advertising.

But sales have slowed.
The CMO believes it's time to invest in marketing communication. He
wants your agency to tell them - and the management team - if you believe they
should invest in marketing communication and why.

You have no more than 10
minutes on a conference call to make your case. Your answer to this
question will determine whether conversations continue. They are talking
to 12 more agencies. What would you say?

The assignment is to
share your talking points/argument in no more than a one page document.
We will be looking for clarity and conviction; interestingness and rigor.

We got 14 entries.
Each of the teams should have got detailed feedback by email. What follows are some macro points that the
illustrious judges – Rob, Andrew and David – and I observed.

Follow the brief. A
lot of responses either ignored the question or had the Pavlovian response of
ad people to decide that the answer was an ad and so jumped straight into
campaign strategy. That wasn’t the
question and we need to break this muscle memory. This challenge was about defining the
business case (if there is one) for marketing comms (in their broadest sense)

Frame the problem the brand faces. You were told “sales have
slowed”. A good planner would work
really hard to diagnose why and address that.
As Andrew put it in his judging
notes, “brands in trouble have usually forgotten what made them great, or
failed to keep that relevant to a culture that relentlessly moves forward. Not
everyone made their argument specific to Kiehl’s.” You have to define the problem to stand any
chance of solving it.

Watch the generalizations.
Lots of you talked about fame and awareness without really saying why it
would help the business. You need to
look more at changing real behavior and
removing the reasons not to buy.

Understand the audience.
The brief made it pretty clear this was a skeptical audience about comms
investment. The best responses would be
explicit about the opportunities investing in marketing comms could create, the
difference it might make and some sense of what payback could be. Better still, you might also have suggested
running an experiment at a low investment level to see what could be done for
Kiehl’s.

Be interesting. Too
many entries just showed the client they’d done some research. There was no
leap. And no one was brave enough to
say, “we don’t think you should invest in comms. Instead, you should xxx.” The objective of this exercise was not to
show how clever you are or how much research you’ve done or even that you think
you have the answer. The objective was
to get another meeting.

Keep it simple. Too
many entries lost us because they were trying to be too clever. As Rob said about one paper: “I would remind
people of something my father – a barrister, so not exactly a stupid man – used
to say. “If you have to prove how
intelligent you are, you’re not very intelligent.” The best bits of planning are like the best
bits of communication: simple thoughts, interestingly expressed.

Anyway,
thanks to all those who took part and thank you to the judges for their time and clarity and usefulness of feedback.

We
did decide there was a winner – Lizbeth Pal, well done. It felt the most credible articulation of the business problem and how comms could address it. There will be something on its way to you!

June 26, 2013

1. An open letter to the management of SWISS airlines (I'd try and talk to you but your frontline staff won't even connect you to their supervisor)2. Anyone considering flying SWISS as a warning of what can happen.

Last Sunday I flew back from Nice to SFO via Zurich. It began as an eventful flight - delayed boarding on to a coach, then waiting on a coach with no AC and in the boiling sun for 15 mins by the plane waiting for it to be cleaned until we were allowed to be board. This made a tight connection very tight but we were promised by the staff, "I guarantee you and your luggage will make the connection".

Well after a jog through Zurich airport I did make the connection by the skin of my teeth as did one of my checked bags. But the other checked bag apparently got left in the unloading gate in Zurich. A great welcome back home not least because it was the bag with some gifts for my daughter that she was anticipating.

This was when the fun really began. I was told that my bag would arrive on the next flight 24 hours later and would be delivered that evening to home. Well, there was no sign. And that's when I dscovered two things: I wasn't given the luggage locator code by the desk agent who informed me of the delay and there was no number to be found for SWISS.

Lucklily, a wonderfully helpful person at United (I know, it's a miracle) gave me the reference code, a number for SWISS and the all important number for the baggage claim desk at SFO. I had, I thought, all I needed.

I then placed the first phone call to the baggage desk at SFO (I believe a joint Lufthansa/Swiss desk). No answer but I was told to leave a voice message and they would call back. In the last 36 hours, I have called 34 times and left 6 voice messages. No answer, no returned call. They appear to be as lost as the bags they apparently look after.

I then thought I'd try calling SWISS. Must have done this about seven times and been on the phone for a couple of hours. Each time they are unable to help. One person recommended I try their site mylostbag.com (suggests I'm far from unique) but after typing in the details I'm left with a blank results page. So at least the website is as broken as the rest of their experience. But here are the real kickers:1. They can't tell me where the bag is. Most simply say they don't know. One claimed it was in SFO, another claimed it was flying out today. At least try and tell a consistent story. At least try and narrow down the search to a continent.2. They won't put you through to a supervisor. They put you on hold and then tell you that the supervisor can't help.3. Not one person has apologized or even appeared sympathetic.

It's been a remarkable 36 hours so far. In an age of total focus on customer service and you would think the ability to know where luggage and passengers are at any time, it becomes even more remarkable.

Sunday was the first time I flew SWISS. It'll also be the last. Now I just hope my bag turns up.

June 04, 2013

Well Rob, Andrew and I realized it was about time we did another APSOTW assignment. Here goes.

This is an exercise in the often overlooked art of defining the problem to be solved and therefore the role for communications. It's a simple challenge we're setting:

Imagine you are at your desk and your phone rings.

It's the new CMO of Kiehl's, a wildly successful brand of stripped down cosmetics. Retail stores around the world. Acquired in 2000 by L'Oreal.

Success has been built through great word of mouth and their habit of giving free samples for you to use or pass along to friends and family.

There has been little, if any, 'traditional' paid advertising.

But sales have slowed. The CMO believes it's time to invest in marketing communication. He wants your agency to tell them - and the management team - if you believe they should invest in marketing communication and why.

You have no more than 10 minutes on a conference call to make your case. Your answer to this question will determine whether conversations continue. They are talking to 12 more agencies. What would you say?

The assignment is to share your talking points/argument in no more than a one page document. We will be looking for clarity and conviction; interestingness and rigor. Send entries by the contact address on this blog by the end of June. We'll pull together a group of judges (hoefully including Rob, Andrew and David from WARC) to get you feedback soon after - this will be posted!

To help you, the kind people at WARC (one of the best resources of intellectual capital about brands and advertising) have offered up free access to some useful articles. You can access:

April 03, 2013

I went out to listen to Daniel Kahneman talk tonight. (If you don't know him he's a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics and is esentially, the father of behavioral economics. His book, Thinking Fast and Slow, is well worth a read). Most of his talk touched on the themes he's best known for and covers in his book: system 1 thinking (associative and intuituve) vs system 2 thinking (rational, considered and requires effort), framing, anchoring, loss aversion, etc. And all delivered in an easy to grasp, interesting and quite often humorous way. (He may also be one of the most genuinely humble people I've ever seen).

But one thing he talked about struck me as being quite interesting for advertising. Dr Kahneman ran a bunch of experiments to understand the relationship between experience and memory. People were asked to hold their hand in 14 degree C water for a minute. Cold enough to be verging on painful but not too cold to be difficult to do. They were then asked to repat this with their other hand. But at the end of the minute rather than being told to remove their hand some warmer water was added to increase the temperature by a degree or two. After another 30 seconds they were told to remove their hand.

The sample were then asked which experience they felt was more painful. 60 seconds of pain or 90 seconds of discomfort. Almost all chose the longer time period. Dr Kahneman explains this though the idea of the experiencing self and the remembering self. Our memories are not connected directly to experiences: their rough aproximations based on the average of the end of the experence and the most intense moment during the experience. The duration of the experience, for example, seems to have little to do with how we remember something.

At the moment as an industry we have become more and more obsessed with designing for the experiencing self: how can we make the bsst experience possible. We talk about brands as experiences, experience design, etc. We tend to increasingly downplay advertising and scrabble to do a quick bit of service design or UX work. We tend not to talk about memories. And aren't the creation, and depiction, of memories something advertising can be very good at? (even uniquely suited to?)

Maybe it's time to stop thinking solely about making better experiences. Maybe we need to think a little more about designing for the remembering self. Maybe the role of advertising is, in fact, to make better memories.

(Oh, and I know it's been quiet for over a year here. I guess I'll try and write the next thing sooner.)

March 30, 2012

(and no, this is not a post searching for those (admittedly good) one hit wonders).

Last night, I was lucky enough to be in Toronto thanks to an invite from the terrific people at the ICA.

And it seems apt perhaps, on the week of the 30th birthdays of two agencies who in many ways were responsible for me working in advertising (BBH and Wieden and Kennedy), that I wanted to try and make a rallying cry for the industry to return to its radical roots. Not simply radical as in different, but radical in its truest meaning - going to the root or origin of what we can do and what we exist to do: make stuff that is the best solution to a client's business problem.

It was lovely to meet a bunch of really smart folk here; thank you for making me so welcome. For anyone else who's interested the slides are below.

March 27, 2012

There was a piece today on Ad Age about facebook. The conversation turned to ROI and the 'value' of a fan. This is what Carolyn Everson of facebook said:

"It's undeniable that a marketer wants to understand their best customers, their biggest fans who will become their brand advocates. … So the notion of what's the value of the fan, we have very specific metrics around that -- Nielsen and ComScore both studied this. Starbucks know fans spend 8% more when they go into Starbucks. Bing knows that fans do 60% more searches. American Express knows fans spend 28% more on small businesses."

Now at first blush that sounds pretty impressive. But read it again. Could it be perhaps that your most loyal customers/heaviest spenders are more likely to be a fan of your brand than the average person?

March 13, 2012

So, it's pretty much the end of SXSW Interactive (well at least for me).

I think, as I mentioned earlier, one of my issues this year is it felt bigger brands were 'crowding out' the startups. But two got it right.

American Express refreshed their positioning of 'membership has privileges' for a digital age. By allowing attendees who synced their Amex cards to twitter to get tickets to Jay Z they created an amazing event. (Oh, and if there's any doubt Jay Z is incredible live).

And he put on an amazing show - here's some typography in full effect.

The other brand that hit it out of the park was Nike. They were singular in their focus on Nike Fuel. They created a pop up store that was one of three places you can buy the band in the world. The purchase experience out-Appled Apple. The people were amazing. They had basketball courts and skateboard parks. An interactive, motion responsive billboard that was crazy. And built a beautiful pop up store that turned into an amazing live venue at night. Fuel band wearers got a VIP line. And full attention to detail - Sleigh Bells came on right at midnight as your Fuel Band reset for another day.

Finally, hats off to the good people at Made By Many who rather than talked actually made something; a beautiful and useful app called Picle.

March 12, 2012

Well it's my last day at this year's SXSW. There has been some amazing stuff to consume and participate in (great talks by Google UX folk, the RIG extended family, the GE Garage and the amazing TED salon) but what has struck me is how it felt like there was little innovation here. I worry that perhaps the success of SXSW interactive will be its undoing; that big brands are crowding out the smaller, nimbler innovators. And perhaps that's a reflection on the noise here of the big boys and a culture that is now less reliant on the big visible firework launch at SXSW for a startup.

Perhaps the greatest debate (well it seems outside Austin) has been around BBH Labs' experiment to innovate in new ways for the homeless to generate money. There have been some nasty (and I think in many cases unfounded) attacks (see this one for example) which seem to be a case of a reaction to something new. The idea was to empower homeless people in Austin to 'manage' their own wifi hotspots; an attempt to update and innovate the old street paper model. Perhaps the execution and the handle of the idea (homeless hotspots) had some issues but the idea (at least to me) feels a worth experiment. It's about letting homeless people manage and sell a valuable and useful good. It's just that wifi in Austin is more valuable than selling a paper in NYC for your commute.

In many this reaction is the dark edge on innovation. I remember a similar reaction when back in the UK the Big Issue was first born. But I think we should judge this idea on what the people who will benefit from it think and their seeming keenness to get involved.

Hopefully the reaction to the new will die down (as it seems from this article in The Atlantic) and people will begin to respect this for what it is - an experiment to create a more relevant way for the homeless to generate money rather than either something that is 'morally offensive' or something that will not be the magical cure to the far more difficult and fundamental issues that create homelessness in the first place

January 09, 2012

It's been quiet for a long time courtesy of the killer combination of craziness at the good ship GSP and not really having anything to blog about. So must start New Year by getting back in to the routine.

Anyway thought I'd point to a couple of things I'm loving very much at the moment which have a common theme of learning by doing.

The first is the Proof site by the good people at Zeus Jones. There's a great write up from Fast Company here but I love how they have turned the intimidating pursuit of learning about great whisky into a fun, beautifully designed social game. It creates a lovely obkect to learn around and has beautifully elegant UX. (And the whisky packaging is gorgeous)

The second thing is the brilliant simple idea of codeyear from the good people at code academy. Lotshas beenwritten about this but I love the way they have taken one of those things you put off because it feels difficulat and intimidating and truned it into a simple weekly pursuit that you know your friends are doing (200,000+ signups already and I'm seeing a whole tranche of signups on twitter). Sign up for it - it's brilliant and coding is one of the things we are all going to have to learn to be fluent in culture and marketing.

Oh, and codeyear was designed in a hour. Something to perhaps bear in mind when looking at the next timing plan....

October 06, 2011

I was never lucky enough to meet him but he changed my life. And millions, probably billions, of others.

In 2005, he gave the Commencement Speech at Stamford. I can't think of a better tribute to post.

Thank you Steve.

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

September 30, 2011

I sense this might be a rehash of a lot of the stuff Neil has written around agile planning but thought I'd share anyway.

I have just finished reading Eric Ries' excelent new book 'The Lean Startup'. Esentially it's a very readable, down to earth, practical crash course in lean development. It's about working out how you can accelerate thorugh a loop of validated learning as quickly as possible with the minimum amount of waste.

Now there has been a lot of stuff written decrying the sloppy way lean (and agile) processes have been misapropriated by the marketng world. But I think there is an important lesson in the lean process for planners and the development of strategy.

At the heart of the lean process lies the idea of the minimum viable product: the most basic thing you can put out into the world to test a hypothesis or assumption and get validated learning from the real world. I believe that in the faster world we live in today, and the relatively ponderous way we (the ad agency industry) produce work, what needs to lie at the heart of communication development is minimum viable planning.

What is this?

It's about doing the minimum amount of work needed to get to, or inspire, an idea. It's about cutting down the waste - things like deliberating adjective soup and brand vegetables for 3 months.

It's about generating hypotheses that can be tested, not sitting in an ivory tower with a damp towel on your head waiting for the answer to appear like divine inspiration.

It's about making stuff that can be tested in the real world, not running weeks of focus groups to hear people talk about how they think they think or might behave.

It's about making as few charts as possible to explain a strategy or idea - get to the work

It's about understanding that strategy has to evolve and morph over time (whilst being aware there's a danger that this could become an excuse for superficiality).

June 06, 2011

I've been privileged to have served on the Board of the VCU Brandcenter for the last three or so years. I've also been lucky to have mentored students there (whether they think the same is a fair question) and visited to teach some guest clasees.

It's a terrific school that, for the last 8 years, has been brilliantly led by the Director, Rick Boyko. He's helped build an amazing program, full of great students and helped the Brandcenter reside in a brilliant, purpose built home. As a result, the students from the school are far more ready for agency life.

The time has come for Rick to leave the school and the search is on to find a brilliant individual to be the next Director. If you, or someone you know, feels right for this job please encourage them to think about applying. It's a huge job; the site perhaps aptly describes it as the biggest job in advertising. The brief for the role is below and more details are available here.

Thanks Rick for all you've done. And let's hope the Brandcenter gets the Director it deserves. Here's the brief:

We are seeking a nationally recognized, high-energy, high profile leader who has the vision and ability to work to inspire faculty, staff and students as well as advertising agencies, marketers and the brands they represent.

We seek someone who has earned the respect of their peers over the course of their professional career. Someone who understands that the business of marketing communications is one built upon the integration of different disciplines working together collaboratively. We seek a strong communicator who understands the importance of transparent decision-making. One who will strive to share the responsibility of continuing to evolve the academic program with the Brandcenter’s professionally accomplished faculty. Experience with advertising or marketing education is desirable, as is experience with and a capacity for development and fundraising.

May 25, 2011

Interesting piece in the Independent about Adele, the British singer who's new album has shifted 5 million units so far. As the sun headline says: "Soul superstar reveals how staying small has made her massive". Here's the article:

The secret of Adele's success? No festivals, tweeting – or selling out

Soul superstar reveals how staying small has made her massive

By Adam Sherwin

Tuesday, 24 May 2011

She refuses to headline Glastonbury, bans her hits from advertising campaigns and won't turn her life into a soap opera. Adele has revealed the five-point plan which turned the singer into the world's most successful – yet reticent – pop star.

The Tottenham-born singer's latest album 21 has sold 5 million copies and currently sits atop the US Billboard chart for the ninth consecutive week. At 11 weeks, she holds the record for the longest consecutive stretch at number one by a female solo artist.

Yet relatively little is known about Adele, 23, who stopped sending personal tweets two years ago, just when her celebrity contemporaries began using Twitter as a confessional.

In an interview with Q magazine, Adele says that, despite huge commercial offers, she refuses to "sell out" and despises artists who exploit their fans for financial gain.

Rule number one in the singer's plan is no advertising tie-ins. "I think it's shameful when you sell out," she says. "It depends what kind of artist you wanna be but I don't want my name anywhere near another brand. I don't wanna be tainted or haunted." Adele attends every "strategy meeting" and approves every decision personally.

Rule number two is to restrict interviews and avoid Lady Gaga-style ubiquity. "I don't want to be in everyone's face. I'm a big music fan and I get really pissed off when it gets like that ... and I don't want people to get like that with me."

She won't tolerate the traditional marketing scam of record labels re-releasing albums with extra tracks to make fans buy a record twice. "I was furious when they did that on [her debut album] 19. I said 'No' and they did it anyway. Just mugging off your fans."

Rule number four: Adele won't play Glastonbury or another festival. "I will not do festivals. The thought of an audience that big frightens the life out of me. I don't think the music would work either. It's all too slow."

And finally arenas, such as the 18,000-capacity O2 Arena and their ilk, are also out. "We had three nights on hold at The O2 and I was like 'I wont play a festival. You think I'm gonna play a fackin' arena? Are you out of your mind?' I'd rather play 12 years at the Barfly [small venue for indie bands] than one night at The O2! So I've made all those decisions and some people are pretty mortified. They think I'm mad."

Paul Rees, the editor of Q, said: "What's become lost in the Lady Gaga-era is the confidence in the idea that less is more. A large element of Adele's success is that she remains something of an enigma and we don't know everything about her."